With voting open for this year’s Oscars, we’re taking a closer look at some of the craftspeople nominated for the year’s best films—from the people who re-created the Golden Age of Hollywood for the Coen Brothers to the makeup artist who redefined a pop culture icon. Check VanityFair.com every day this week for another close-up look at 2017’s Oscar nominees.

Can you imagine designing 56 unique alien species?

Neither can Joel Harlow and Richard Alonzo, the Oscar-nominated makeup team behind Star Trek Beyond—and they actually accomplished that feat, with a staff of 60, on three different continents, working around the clock to fill the tall order.

“When we started, the script was still being worked on,” Harlow explained during a recent phone call. “The number of alien races grew over time. . . If we had known that was what was ultimately required, it would have been incredibly overwhelming—a monumental hurdle to get over mentally, as opposed to practically.”

As firm believers that truth is stranger than fiction, Harlow and Alonzo began their quest by looking to nature for inspiration—poring over photos and illustrations of aquatic creatures, mammal life, microscopic life, and plant life.

“You take all these images, and whether consciously or subconsciously, because you’ve seen things over the years, you just start melding them together,” said Harlow, who previously won an Oscar in 2010 for his makeup on the first rebooted Star Trek. “It was kind of a free-for-all in the beginning. I suggested we start creating alien designs, and everybody [on the in-house team] brought their love of Star Trek to it, and their own artistic sensibilities.”

Harlow’s fascination with aquatic life is reflected, for example, in Natalia—a fastidiously-designed creature whose head looks like a giant Nautilus, played by Ashley Edner. Makeup application took seven hours to complete, and could happen only after the hundreds of hours logged engineering a practical support system for the creature’s head.

“The size of the head on that character was so large, and there was so much exposed anatomy, because she was basically wearing a cocktail dress. It was a tremendous undertaking,” explained Harlow. “We had to figure out how to solve the weight issues of a head that big while still allowing the actress to perform through the makeup.” The answer came courtesy of mold shop supervisor Gil Liberto, who had worked with Harlow on the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise and “figured out a way to cast the shell out of a feather-weight plastic that was incredibly durable.” Amazingly, the prosthetics ended up being heavier than the head itself. “If we didn’t have the support of production and [director] Justin Lin, that character probably would’ve been the first creature to fall by the wayside,” said Harlow.

Harlow and Alonzo also had to figure out how to bring their 55 other alien species to life practically, so that actors could work comfortably and still express themselves beneath heavy prosthetics.

Melissa Roxburgh (Ensign Syl) on set and one of the Star Trek Beyond masks behind the scenes.

“Each of those designs presented its own set of challenges,” said Harlow, “be it translucency, weight, durability, movement, density, the color schemes, contact lenses, dentures, whatever it was. They all had their own challenges that we needed to rise to to execute them. We ended up using, essentially, everything that we had ever used on any film for Star Trek Beyond.”

They even managed to devise new makeup strategies while they were at it.

Lead technician and artist Lenny MacDonald, for example, found a source for the iridescent color-shifting pigments used to print currency so that they could use it on such characters as Tyvanna (Anita Brown) and Natalia.

“The pigment allows a shift between three different colors,” said Harlow. “That was absolutely one of the most unusual materials we used, because it had never been used for makeup before.”

For Krall, the character played by Idris Elba, the team used light effects to show his transformation every time he took another character’s energy, by embedding tracing lights and fiber optics into the character’s head.

For characters more dependent on painstakingly precise makeup than prosthetics—like Jaylah (Sofia Boutella)—Alonzo began by making sure the makeup trailer was completely still. (Not an easy feat for any area bustling with a huge cast being transformed into alien creatures.) He also concocted an absolutely “bulletproof” makeup formula, meaning that “not a single color would bleed from one to the other, even if a single tear hit it.”

Despite the number of actors and designs involved in Star Trek Beyond, Harlow and Alonzo only remembered one real on-set crisis—and that one involved a creature they hadn’t created.

“We had this one character, Satine (Bryce Soderberg), whose look was inspired by Venus flytraps,” recalled Harlow. “Bryce was completely covered in makeup and prosthetics. He even was covered with acrylic eyes that had to be removed [between takes] with magnets so he could see. Somehow, one day when we took out those acrylic eyes, a bee managed to fly into one of the tiny holes. I looked over at him, and suddenly his arms were flailing.”

“Fortunately, he didn’t get stung,” Harlow laughed. “We got in there and the bee was trapped, but found its way out.”